That might seem a little extreme. Given the local geopolitical and humanitarian realities, it also might be the most desirable. At least until a “4+2” type of conference can settle on the terms of Korean reunification.

But honestly, trying to predict anything about North Korea is a fool’s game. Kim Jong-un might just hold the place together. Or the generals and party bosses might decide to get out while the getting is good. If there’s anything left in the Treasury (including counterfeit U.S. hundred-dollar bills), then maybe we’ll see all-new buyers of Riviera condos in the not-too-distant future. But that kind of looting has to be done judiciously, or you risk general societal collapse before you make it to the exits. The current Egyptian junta is showing just the way to do it. Careful notes are being taken in Pyongyang, I’m sure.

But my gut tells me that North Korea will collapse, because it has been collapsing, slowly, under Kim Jong-il. I just don’t see how a 28-year-old with apparently little experience is going to accomplish anything better than his old man. Most likely, the rot will accelerate.

And it won’t be pretty. As I wrote more than eight years ago:

South Korea has fewer than 50 million people, and while they’ve made great strides, their per capita income is still only up to that of modern Poland. They aren’t poor, but they aren’t nearly as rich as West Germany was. In addition, their economy isn’t as mature or robust, as the Asian Financial Crisis of a couple years back showed.

Up north are 22 million of their starving brethren. Before the Communist dictatorship, they lived a brutal existence as virtual slaves of Japan. “Chosen,” as Tokyo called Korea, was annexed by the Japanese Empire 93 years ago. It’s safe to say that there is no one in North Korea with any experience living in a politically modern, free, democratic, or tolerant state. Travel is forbidden. Only a small handful of South Koreans are allowed north. There is only one radio station, and it runs nothing but the foulest sort of propaganda. And according to a story in US News & World Report a few weeks ago, North Korea even has concentration camps bigger than the District of Columbia.

Through no fault of their own, the people of North Korea simply aren’t ready to enter the modern world, and South Korea can’t afford to feed, house, re-educate, and re-civilize them all.

Whether or not there’s a war, when North Korea collapses there’s going to be a humanitarian crisis on a scale the world has never seen — 22 million scared, hungry, and desperate people left without any semblance of anything familiar.

This is why I say, given the other realities on the ground, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army might be the best hope for the people of North Korea.

19 Comments, 11 Threads

But that kind of looting has to be done judiciously, or you risk general societal collapse before you make it to the exits. The current Egyptian junta is showing just the way to do it. Careful notes are being taken in Pyongyang, I’m sure.

Are you being sarcastic? Given the chaos in Egypt, I’d say the junta is failing miserably at “judiciously” pilfering the state treasury.

Remember back a years ago when the PRC was doing some rather elaborate Naval exercises along the shangdong penninsula and more than a few of us speculated that it was about preparing for an invasion of North Korea?

North Korean use of foreign currency has nothing to do with domestic economic needs, it has almost everything to do with ruling class elites and their own economic needs. This article says there has been a spike in recent months of NK purchase of foreign currency, tells me that there is some evidence here that the ruling class is packing its bags.

Even though Beijing stepped in to fill the vacuum the Soviet Union had left, its aid was modest: the real cash came from illegal trade with the flourishing Chinese cities across the border.

Behind the militaristic façade, the South Korea-based Russian scholar Andrei Lankov observed in a thoughtful essay written earlier this year that the state steadily lost authority. In the last two decades, Dr. Lankov wrote, the state lost “its ability (perhaps also its will) to control the daily activities of its subjects as well as how they made a living.”

The American scholar Patrick Chovanec, who visited some of North Korea’s least-accessible regions last summer, wrote: “One thing that really surprised me was the number of luxury sedans and SUVs, brands like BMWs and Mercedes, on the city streets.” “Obviously,” he concluded, “somebody has cash.”

In North Korea, Kim Jong-il has left behind, formal power still lies with a caste of military officers and bureaucrats — but economic influence now rests with a new semi-legal merchant class. “North Korean society,” Dr. Lankov observed, “has become defined by one’s relationship to money, not by one’s relationship to the bureaucracy.

“Money talks,” and for better or worse, in North Korea, money talks ever louder.”

China doesn’t want 22 million starving Koreans flooding the country, and I don’t think they wouldn’t hesitate to use the machine gun.

South Korea can’t afford reunification, and the US is broke as well. Japan’s got its own issues too. Unless the generals and baby Kim decide to go for economic liberalization, it’s going to make the earlier famine look like a picnic. On the other hand, maybe those Chinese paratroopers will force economic liberalization.

If youget the chance, watch the documentary Kimjongzilla (IIRC). Very chilling about the brutality in that benighted country. And many of the women who escape to China are forced into brothels. Despite knowing that they run a substantial risk of being made into prostitutes, they still flee.

I think you are right that NK will collapse and China will invade. As for people fleeing to China, when they flee now they are shot by either NK guards or Chinese. Some do get through though. It’s doubtful that Kim Jung-un is old enough to have mastered the survival skills needed to keep his generals in control. The credible reports I’ve heard of North Korea show it as a nightmarish corner of Hell, but it could get worse with collapse.